An Inventory of Modern Fallacies

False dichotomies. Peter Kreeft gives a good example of this. People today assume that there are only two ways of looking at gender: egalitarianism, which holds that men and women are the same, and therefore of equal value, and misogyny and misandry, which hold that the genders are different, and that one of them is therefore better than the other. As Kreeft points out, both of these viewpoints, although superficially different, share the strange assumption that any difference must be a difference in value – in so many words, that “different from” always means “better than.” People see that misogyny and misandry are morally repugnant and logically untenable, and, having had the idea drummed into their heads that egalitarianism is the only other choice, conclude by process of elimination that egalitarianism must be true. (It never seems to strike them that the egalitarian position is equally as morally repugnant and logically untenable.) The third, correct option – the idea that the genders are complementary and different without either being better or worse than the other – is ignored. Public discourse is full of false dichotomies – in the American immigration debate, for instance, it is often implied that one must either support unlimited immigration or personally loathe everyone from Mexico. The establishment Right, on its part, likes to imply that laissez-faire capitalism and Soviet-style Communism are the only possible economic systems.

Psychologization. When alternative points of view treated are treated as mental illnesses rather than legitimate opinions. Most commonly used by combining the name of a favored victim group with the word “phobia” (“homophobia,” “islamophobia,” etc.), implying that any criticism of (for example) homosexuality or Islam is an irrational derangement on the same level as claustrophobia or arachnophobia. For a book-length example, see Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality.